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Over half of all new cars sold in the U.S. by 2030 are expected to be electric vehicles. That could put a major strain on our nation’s electric grid, an aging system built for a world that runs on fossil fuels.

Domestic electricity demand in 2022 is expected to increase up to 18% by 2030 and 38% by 2035, according to an analysis by the Rapid Energy Policy Evaluation and Analysis Toolkit, or REPEAT, an energy policy project out of Princeton University. That’s a big change over the roughly 5% increase we saw in the past decade.

“So we’ve got a lot of power demand coming to this country when we really didn’t have any for the last, like, 25 years,” said Rob Gramlich, founder and president of Grid Strategies, a transmission policy group.

While many parts of the economy are moving away from fossil fuels toward electrification — think household appliances such as stoves, and space heating for homes and offices — the transportation sector is driving the increase. Light-duty vehicles, a segment that excludes large trucks and aviation, are projected to use up to 3,360% more electricity by 2035 than they do today, according to Princeton’s data.

But electrification is only an effective decarbonization solution if it’s paired with a major buildout of renewable energy. “So we have both supply-side and demand-side drivers of big grid needs,” Gramlich said.

That means we need major changes to the grid: more high-voltage transmission lines to transport electricity from rural wind and solar power plants to demand centers; smaller distribution lines and transformers for last-mile electricity delivery; and hardware such as inverters that allow customers with home batteries, EVs and solar panels to feed excess energy back into the grid. 

It’s not going to be cheap. In a study commissioned by the California Public Utilities Commission, grid analytics company Kevala forecasts that California alone will have to spend $50 billion by 2035 in distribution grid upgrades to meet its ambitious EV targets.

Major grid infrastructure needs

Charging electric vehicles is quite electricity intensive. While a direct comparison with appliances depends on many variables, an owner of a new Tesla Model 3 who drives the national average of around 14,000 miles per year would use about the same amount of electricity charging their vehicle at home as they would on their electric water heater over the course of a year, and about 10 times more electricity than it would take to power a new, energy-efficient refrigerator. Larger electric vehicles such as the Ford F-150 Lightning would generally use more electricity than a central AC unit in a large home. 

Lydia Krefta, director of clean energy transportation at PG&E, said the utility currently has about 470,000 electric vehicles connected to the grid in its service territory of Northern and Central California and is aiming for 3 million by 2030.

Given that PG&E’s territory covers about 1 in 7 electric vehicles in the U.S., how it handles the EV transition could serve as a model for the nation. It’s no easy task. The utility is tied to a four-year funding cycle for grid infrastructure upgrades, and its last funding request was in 2021. Now that funding will definitely fall short of what’s needed, Krefta said.

Workers for Source Power Services, contracted by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), repair a power transformer in Healdsburg, California, on Thursday, Oct. 31, 2019.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

“A lot of the analysis that went into that request came from, like, 2019 or 2020 forecasts, in particular some of those older EV forecasts that didn’t anticipate some of the growth that we believe we’re more likely to see now,” Krefta said. This situation has PG&E applying for numerous state and federal grants that could help it meet its electrification targets.

“I think right now people have an overly simplistic view of what electrification of transportation means,” said Kevala CEO Aram Shumavon. “If done right, it will be phenomenal; if mismanaged, there are going to be a lot of upset people, and that is a real risk. That’s a risk for regulators. That’s a risk for politicians, and that’s a risk for utilities.”

Shumavon said that if grid infrastructure doesn’t keep up with the EV boom, drivers can expect charging difficulties such as long queues or only being able to charge at certain times and places. An overly strained grid will also be more vulnerable to extreme weather events and prone to blackouts, which California experienced in 2020.

The most straightforward way to meet growing electricity demand is to bring more energy sources online, preferably green ones. But though it’s easy to site coal and natural gas plants close to population centers, the best solar and wind resources are usually more rural.

That means what the U.S. really needs is more high-voltage transmission lines, which can transport solar and wind resources across county and state lines.

But Gramlich said that while we’re constantly spending money replacing and upgrading old lines, we’re hardly building any new ones. “I think we need probably about $20 [million] or $30 million a year on new capacity, new line miles and new delivery capacity. We’re spending close to zero on that right now.”

There are major regulatory hurdles when it comes to building new transmission lines, which often cross through multiple counties, states and utility service areas, all of which need to approve of the line and agree on how to finance it.

“If you just think about a line crossing two or three dozen different utility territories, they have a way to recover their costs on their local system, but they kind of throw up their hands when there’s something that benefits three dozen utilities, and who’s supposed to pay, how much, and how are we going to decide?” Gramlich said.

Permitting is a major holdup as well. All new energy projects must undergo a series of impact studies to evaluate what new transmission equipment is required, how much it will cost and who will pay. But the list of projects stuck in this process is massive. The total amount of electricity generation in the queues, almost all of which is renewable, exceeds the total generating capacity on the grid today.

The Inflation Reduction Act has the potential to cut emissions by about 1 billion tons by 2030, according to Princeton’s REPEAT project. But by this same analysis, if transmission infrastructure buildout doesn’t more than double its historical growth rate of 1% per year, more than 80% of these reductions could be lost.

An ‘in-between period’

Efforts are underway to expedite the energy infrastructure buildout. Most notably, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., introduced a permitting reform bill in May after similar measures failed last year. President Joe Biden has thrown his support behind the bill, which would speed up permitting for all types of energy projects, including fossil fuel infrastructure. The politics will be tricky to navigate, though, as many Democrats view the bill as overly friendly to fossil fuel interests.

But even if the pace of permitting accelerates and we start spending big on transmission soon, it will still take years to build the infrastructure that’s needed.

“There’s going to be an in-between period where the need is very high, but the transmission can’t be built during the time period where the need happens, and distributed energy resources are going to play a very active role in managing that process, because no other resources will be available,” Shumavon explained.

That means that resources such as residential solar and battery systems could help stabilize the grid as customers generate their own power and sell excess electricity back to the grid. Automakers are also increasingly equipping their EVs with bidirectional charging capabilities, which allow customers to use their giant EV battery packs to power their homes or provide electricity back to the grid, just like a regular home battery system. Tesla doesn’t currently offer this functionality, but has indicated that it will in the coming years, while other models such as the Ford F-150 Lightning and Nissan Leaf already do.

Ford’s all electric F-150 Lightning offers bidirectional charging, allowing customers to use the truck’s EV battery to power their home.

Ford Motor Company

There will also likely be greater emphasis on energy efficiency and energy timing use. PG&E, for example, is thinking about how to optimize charging times for large electric vehicle fleets.

“One thing that we’re trying to do is to work with some of these companies that are putting in substantial loads to provide flexible load constraints where we can say you can only charge 50 EVs at 7 p.m., but at 2 a.m. you can charge all 100,” Krefta said.

Krefta hopes constraints on charging times are temporary, though, and said that moving forward, PG&E is looking to incentivize consumers through dynamic pricing, in which electricity prices are higher during times of peak demand and lower at off-peak hours. And the utility is working with automakers to figure out how electric vehicles can provide maximum benefit to the grid.

“What kinds of things do you need to do in your garage to enable your vehicle to power your home? How can you leverage your vehicle to charge whenever there’s renewables on the grid and they’re clean and low cost and then discharge back to the grid during the evening hours?” Krefta said it’s questions like these that will help create the green grid of the future.

Watch the video to learn more about how the U.S. power grid can prepare for the boom in electric vehicles.

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Nvidia just spent over $900 million to hire Enfabrica CEO, license AI startup’s technology

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Nvidia just spent over 0 million to hire Enfabrica CEO, license AI startup's technology

Co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., Jensen Huang attends the 9th edition of the VivaTech trade show in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Chesnot | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Nvidia has just shelled out over $900 million to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees at the artificial intelligence hardware startup, and to license the company’s technology, CNBC has learned.

In a deal reminiscent of recent AI talent acquisitions made by Meta and Google, Nvidia is paying cash and stock in the transaction, according to two people familiar with the arrangement. The deal closed last week, and Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar has joined Nvidia, said the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private.

Nvidia has served as the backbone of the AI boom that began with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. The company’s graphics processing units (GPUs), which are generally purchased in large clusters, power the training of large language models and allow for big cloud providers to offer AI services to clients.

Enfabrica, founded in 2019, says its technology can connect more than 100,000 GPUs together. It’s a solution that could help Nvidia offer integrated systems around its chips so clusters can effectively serve as a single computer.

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment, and Enfabrica didn’t provide a comment for this story.

While Nvidia’s earlier AI chips like the A100 were single processors slotted into servers, its most recent products come in tall racks with 72 GPUs installed working together. That’s the kind of system inside the $4 billion data center in Wisconsin that Microsoft announced on Thursday.

Nvidia previously invested in Enfabrica as part of a $125 million Series B round in 2023 that was led by Atreides Management. The company didn’t disclose its valuation at the time, but said that it was a fivefold increase from its Series A funding.

Late last year, Enfabrica raised another $115 million from investors including Spark Capital, Arm, Samsung and Cisco. According to PitchBook, the post-money valuation was about $600 million.

Tech giants Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all poured money into hiring top AI talent through deals that resemble acquihires. The transactions allow the companies to bring in top engineers and researchers without worrying about the regulatory hassles that come with acquisitions.

The biggest such deal came in June, when Meta spent $14.3 billion on Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang and others and took a 49% stake in the AI startup. A month later, Google announced an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf, and other research and development employees in a $2.4 billion deal that also included licensing fees.

Last year, Google made a similar deal to bring in the founders of Character.AI. Microsoft did the same thing for Inflection, as did Amazon for Adept.

While Nvidia has been a big investor in AI technologies and infrastructure, it hasn’t been a significant acquirer. The company’s only billion-dollar-plus deal was for Israeli chip designer Mellanox, a $6.9 billion purchase announced in 2019. Much of Nvidia’s current Blackwell product lineup is enabled by networking technology that it acquired through that acquisition.

Nvidia tried to buy chip design company Arm, but that deal collapsed in 2022 due to regulatory pressure. In the past year, Nvidia closed a $700 million purchase of Run:ai, an Israeli company whose technology helps software makers optimize their infrastructure for AI.

On Thursday, Nvidia announced one of its most sizable investments to date. The chipmaker said it’s taken a $5 billion stake in Intel, and announced that the two companies will collaborate on AI processors. Nvidia also said this week that it invested close to $700 million in U.K. data center startup Nscale.

— Correction: A prior version of this story mistakenly included the name of a company as an investor in Enfabrica.

WATCH: Nvidia CEO says he’s delighted to work with Intel

Nvidia CEO: Delighted to work with Intel in 'great partnership'

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CrowdStrike pops nearly 13% on upbeat long-term guidance at investor day

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CrowdStrike pops nearly 13% on upbeat long-term guidance at investor day

CrowdStrike logo is seen in this illustration taken July 29, 2024.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

CrowdStrike shares popped about 13%, a day after the cybersecurity firm issued better-than-expected long-term guidance at its investor day.

The company on Wednesday said it expects net new annual recurring revenues to grow at least 20% in 2027, ahead of analysts’ expectations. CrowdStrike plans for ARR to hit $10 billion by 2031, and then double to $20 billion by 2036.

Earlier this week, the firm said it was buying AI security platform Pangea and announced a partnership with Salesforce.

“CrowdStrike is by far the most advanced security platform in the industry, and the plethora of AI-based solutions announced today will further separate CrowdStrike from the competition,” wrote Wells Fargo analyst Andrew Nowinski in a note following the event.

Some Wall Street firms also boosted their price targets.

Read more CNBC tech news

Cybersecurity has taken center stage this year as businesses beef up security in the age of artificial intelligence. Many companies have harnessed AI tools to strengthen their offering as threats rise in sophistication.

This year’s biggest tech deals have included Google’s $32 billion acquisition of Israeli cybersecurity startup Wiz and Palo Alto Networks’ $25 billion CyberArk deal.

Cybersecurity firm Netskope hit the public market Thursday, while Thoma Bravo-backed SailPoint debuted earlier this year.

During its recent earnings report, CrowdStrike’s revenue guidance for the third quarter fell short of analysts’ expectations.

Don’t miss these insights from CNBC PRO

CrowdStrike shares drop 8% despite quarterly beat

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Nvidia CEO Huang says $5 billion stake in rival Intel will be ‘an incredible investment’

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Nvidia CEO Huang says  billion stake in rival Intel will be 'an incredible investment'

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Reuters

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the company’s $5 billion investment and technology collaboration with Intel comes after the two companies held discussions for nearly a year.

Huang said that he communicated personally with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan about the partnership. He called Tan a “longtime friend” on a Thursday call with reporters after the companies announced that Nvidia would co-develop data center and PC chips with Intel as part of the investment deal. On the call, Tan said he and Huang have known each other for 30 years.

“We thought it was going to be such an incredible investment,” Huang said.

Nvidia said it will collaborate with the chipmaker to create artificial intelligence systems for data centers that combine Intel’s x86-based central processors with Nvidia’s graphics processors and networking.

Intel will also sell CPUs for PCs and notebooks that integrate Nvidia graphics processors, or GPUs.

The transaction itself took a few months to come together, Intel’s revenue chief Greg Ernst wrote in a LinkedIn post, adding that the agreement was reached on Saturday.

The investment highlights how the fortunes of the two companies have switched atop Silicon Valley’s pecking order as a result of the AI explosion ushered in by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.

Intel shares are down 31.78% in the last five years, while Nvidia shares are up 1,348% as of opening prices on Thursday. Nvidia is worth over $4.25 trillion, while Intel is only worth $143 billion.

How Intel and Nvidia will collaborate

For decades, the most important part in a PC or server was the central processor, and Intel dominated the market for those chips. But AI infrastructure, like the machines in the $4 billion data center Microsoft announced on Thursday, often needs two or more Nvidia GPUs for every one CPU.

Nvidia AI systems, like the NVL72 used by Microsoft, come with Arm-based CPUs, instead of Intel x86-based CPUs. On the call, Huang said Nvidia will soon support Intel’s CPUs in its NVLink racks for AI.

“We’ll buy those CPUs from from Intel, and then we’ll connect it into super chips that then becomes our compute node, that then gets integrated into a rack scale AI supercomputer,” Huang said.

Nvidia will also contribute GPU technology to Intel chips that ship in laptops and PCs, which is an underserved market, Huang said. In total, the addressable markets for the two product collaborations are worth $50 billion, Huang said.

“We’re going to become a very large customer of Intel CPUs, and we’re going to be a large supplier of GPU chiplets into Intel” chips, he said.

Huang said the deal with Intel will have “no” impact on Nvidia’s business relationship with Arm.

Thursday’s investment deal is focused on the relationship between Nvidia and Intel’s product division, not its foundry. The two companies, however, did not rule out future foundry partnerships.

“We’ve always evaluated Intel’s foundry technology, and we’re going to continue to do it, but today, this announcement, is squarely focused on these custom CPUs,” Huang said. Nvidia currently uses Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to manufacture its chips.

The collaboration will use Intel’s packaging, which is a part chip manufacturing that occurs toward the end of the process and combines several chip components into a single part that can be installed in machines.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan makes a speech on stage in Taipei, Taiwan May 19, 2025.

Ann Wang | Reuters

Tan said he was grateful for Nvidia’s vote of confidence.

“‘I’d like to thank Jensen for the confidence in me, and our team and Intel will work really hard to make sure it’s a good return for you,” Tan said.

Last year, Intel’s board removed previous CEO Pat Gelsinger because of rising costs in its manufacturing business and the company’s failure to gain a foothold in AI chips. In March, Intel named Tan, a well-connected investor who had turned around chip software firm Cadence Design Systems, its new chief executive.

Tan has focused on cutting costs and raising money in his short tenure leading Intel even as the future of the company’s manufacturing business, called Intel Foundry, remains unclear.

In addition to the $5 billion from Nvidia and $8.9 billion from the U.S. government, Intel has taken a $2 billion investment from SoftBank, sold a majority stake in its ASIC subsidiary Altera to Silver Lake for $3.3 billion and sold $1 billion in stock from Mobileye, its self-driving car subsidiary.

Intel has also cut significant staff, saying in July that it would eliminate 15% of its workforce by the end of the year.

The company develops its own chips as well as manufacturing them. It wants to manufacture chips for companies like Nvidia or Apple, but has yet to secure them as customers. Analysts say Intel needs a big foundry client to signal that its technology is stable and ready for volume production.

But cutting-edge chip manufacturing is expensive, and Intel has signaled that if it can’t get enough customers, it may not continue investing in its foundry. That could spark a reaction from Washington, whose politicians and lobbyists consider Intel to be strategically important for the nation because it is the only American company capable of manufacturing the most advanced chips.

The Trump administration took a 10% stake in Intel in August. Intel was previously in line to receive $8.9 billion in grants and loans from the CHIPS Act, but the Trump administration asked and received an equity stake in the chipmaker in exchange for the money.

Huang was with Trump this week in England to attend a State Dinner at Windsor Palace and announce new projects and investments in the U.K. But the Trump administration wasn’t involved in this deal, according to a White House official and Huang.

“Intel’s new partnership with Nvidia is a major milestone for American high-tech manufacturing,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.

— CNBC’s Megan Cassella contributed to this story

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Nvidia wants Intel's consumer business, says Deepwater's Gene Munster

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